persuaded themselves
that they were "doing God service" when they subjected to an ignominious
execution the man who had so roused all their personal and selfish
antagonism. The Pharisees were hopelessly unable to understand Him, but
that was because of their own blindness. In laying down the principle
that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, our Lord
was expressing an eternal truth, not only to the world of His own time
but to the world of all ages.

To associate the idea of a man of the world with a knowledge of its dark
places and shallow forms alone, tends to belittle and degrade our
conception of the world; whereas the world, so far from being only dark
or shallow, is well worth knowing and serving, provided it is made to
serve, in its turn, all that is vigorous and wholesome in man. We should
recognize the beauty and power of the things of this world as servants
to our highest law; it is only the perversion of those things that is to
be renounced.

The true man of the world understands perverted human nature,--from the
gourmand to the keen political sharper; he is a man who is never
deceived by appearances, and who sees the real character beneath its
external polish; a man who, with his clearer understanding, takes each
perversion at its true value, understands the Iagos and the Don Juans
equally well, with no slightest taste for either. They are all forms of
disease to him. He can trace Iago's villainy to its own destruction and
Don Juan's sensuality to its worse than satiety.

Again, a true man of the world is a man who knows, and loves, and is a
part of all the wholesomeness in the world; a man who is quickly at home
in every variety of good form, because the instincts of a gentleman are
the same all the world over, although customs may differ entirely; a man
who, while accustomed to all conventions and respecting them where they
properly belong, is easily and happily at home without them; a man who,
while preferring fine instincts as well as strong characters in his
fellow men, is so alive to the best in human nature that he can find the
gold thread anywhere in the wax, if there is a gold thread there; a man
whose thoughts are so much at home in fresh air that he at once detects
a close or tainted atmosphere, but can keep the unpleasant sensation to
himself; who never intrudes his love of fresh air upon others, but,
being surrounded by it himself, enjoys it habitually and as a matter of